Dr. Fairchild has been a faculty member in the Program of Color Science / Munsell Color Science Laboratory since 1986 and achieved the rank of Professor in 1999. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Imaging Science from R.I.T. and Ph.D. in Vision Science from the University of Rochester. He also serves as the Director of the Ph.D. Program of Color Science and Munsell Color Science Laboratory, roles he held from 1996-2007 and 2013-present. He is author or co-author of over 300 technical publications in color and imaging sciences and the books, Color Appearance Models, 3rd Ed. (2013), which serves as a reference to the fundamentals of color appearance and the formulation of specific models and the Handbook of Color Psychology (2015) as well as 3 websites related to color and science education. He has received 8 best-paper awards from various conferences. He has supervised the graduate research of 59 M.S. or Ph.D. students.

Mark has been actively involved in externally-sponsored research at RIT for over 30 years, working with both corporate and government sponsors. He has taught a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in imaging and color science. His current research interests include studies of individual differences in color perception, system and visual performance for high-dynamic-range, wide-color-gamut, displays along with the measurement and modeling of color appearance in wine. He served as Color Imaging Editor for IS&T’s Journal of Imaging Science and Technology for 3 years and was named a Fellow of IS&T (the Society for Imaging Science and Technology) in 2003 for his contributions to digital color imaging. Mark was presented with the 1995 Bartleson Award by the Colour Group (Great Britain) and the 2002 Macbeth Award by the Inter-Society Color Council for his research work in color appearance and other areas of color science.

In 2007, Mark was presented with the Davies Medal by the Royal Photographic Society for his contributions to photography in the digital field of imaging science. He received the 2008 IS&T Raymond C. Bowman award for excellence in imaging education. In 2010 he was named Senior Member and in 2012 Fellow of OSA (The Optical Society). Also in 2012 he also received the Science Divulgation Award from the University of Granada for his work to bring science concepts to children through concepts of color. He was chair of CIE Technical Committee 1-34 on color appearance models, is currently participating in several other CIE technical committees dealing with color appearance and image technology issues. Mark is an active member of IS&T, ISCC, CORM, CIE-USA, OSA, SID, and ACM-SIGGRAPH.

As Founding Head of the Integrated Sciences Academy in RIT's College of Science, his role is to facilitate the growth and strengthening of the college's multidisciplinary academic and research programs, Color Science amongst them.